Word: virtuoso
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JAMES MONTGOMERY BAND-- James Montgomery spent a long time spreading his blues around Cambridge before his Band, formerly his Blues Band, signed a recording contract with Atlantic. Two years ago, in a virtuoso display of harp playing, talking blues, and group discipline, the ensemble upstaged an ailing Bonnie Raitt in one of Sanders Theater's more rollicking concerts. Assuming his harp is still in tune, Montgomery can be expected to lead his band to a successful return to Cambridge this week at The Performance Center. They are playing with the Chris Rhodes Band, a local favorite...
...friend and upstairs neighbor. Writing about the 1961 production, Critic Robert Brustein observed that "Mostel has a great dancer's control of movement, a great actor's control of voice, a great mime's control of facial expression." The film preserves Mostel's virtuoso performance, including a long, bumpy transformation from man into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing metamorphosis into another member of the herd does provide the movie...
...work and, after the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, the most popular piano concerto in the repertory. As for Rachmaninoff, he went on to lead one of the few 20th century musical careers that can accurately be called spectacular. Only the Pole Josef Hofmann could be compared with him as a virtuoso pianist, and even Hofmann behaved deferentially around Rachmaninoff. No other concert pianist, except Prokofiev, had Rachmaninoff's stature as a composer. No composer since Liszt ranked as such a keyboard soiree idol...
Most important of the three men was Henry Kissinger the U.S. Secretary of State and presidential adviser. As Nixon was engulfed by Watergate, Kissinger became, in effect, America's president for foreign affairs. He ranged the world in a virtuoso performance of solo diplomacy. He twice toured major capitals of the Middle-East, first to help achieve a ceasefire, then to complete arrangements for a Geneva conference seeking a long-range settlement. Twice he flew to Moscow to bolster detente or ease
...have a proclivity for equating feeling with decibels, but his playing is characterized by careful attention to rhythm and phrasing. Even his critics concede that he possesses one of the century's greatest organ-virtuoso techniques. Born in Princeton, Ill., where his mother was alto soloist in the Lutheran church and his father owned the local moviehouse and was the "best auctioneer the state of Illinois has ever seen," Fox began piano lessons at eight. A year later he discovered an old organ in a barn and taught himself to play, practicing up to 16 hours...